“But what if I’m not?”
She hadn’t meant to say that. She didn’t even know where it came from—and yet it was there between them, stretched out prone on the small table, surrounded by the flickering flames of the candles and the rich Greek night all around them.
“There are always consequences,” he said after a moment. “In this case, I don’t believe a single thing you say. You wanted to manipulate me and you were willing to go as far as possible to do it.”
“You’re one to talk,” she managed to reply, though her eyes felt glazed and she was half-afraid the rest of her had turned to stone. “Where do you think I learned how to use sex as a weapon in the first place?”
“You’re such a liar.” It came out somewhere between wonder and despair, and she’d never heard him use that tone of voice before. It tore at her. “You lie to my face about things I know are not true. I was there. I’ve never used sex. I’ve simply admitted the attraction I feel and occasionally acted upon it. There’s a difference.”
“Because you say there is!” she threw at him. “That doesn’t make it so!”
“I’ve been dreaming of getting my mouth on you for years,” he growled at her, looking much too dangerous for a man who still appeared to do no more than lounge there across from her. “I didn’t ask you to strip for me, Mattie. You did that.”
“But you were happy to take advantage, of course.”
“I’m not going to have this argument,” he told her then, that colder note of impatience back in his voice. Shifting, she thought, from potentially emotional husband to unamused CEO in an instant, and she loathed it. “Because we both know you know better—and that I wasn’t the one playing games.”
“Nicodemus—”
“Eat your dinner,” he told her. He picked up his own fork and speared a piece of lamb with barely repressed violence.
“This is fake,” she gritted out, and was surprised to discover that her hands were in fists in her lap, and her throat was so tight it hurt to speak. “This is nothing but a game of make-believe. We might as well be the tabloid stories they make up about us. How is this any better?”
“This is a marriage,” he retorted, all of that ferocity in his voice , and darkening his gaze, and she was sick enough to exult in that, because at least she’d reached something in him. “Our marriage. You should count yourself lucky I’ve decided it should be so goddamned civil.”
* * *
Nicodemus woke in a rush.
He didn’t need to reach out to the empty mattress beside him to realize that Mattie wasn’t in the bed. He knew immediately. But his hand moved over the spot she normally occupied—as far away from him as she could get and still technically be in the same bed—and he found it cold. Utterly devoid of her heat, telling him that she’d slipped away again. She always did.
He swung his way out of the bed and onto his feet, not bothering to turn on the lights. Outside, the moon was flirting toward fullness, creating a rippling path across the dark water, and Nicodemus was furious.
He would have asked himself what the hell was wrong with him, but he knew. It was always Mattie, always this same woman lodged in him like a pebble in his shoe. Or a knife in his side, if he was more accurate, and he had no idea how he was maintaining his control. If it didn’t bother her so much when he went cold and distant, he acknowledged to himself in the predawn quiet of his empty bedroom, he would have broken already.
So maybe he played as many games as she did, after all.
But it was this particular game of hers—this nightly ritual—that he thought might drive him to the brink of madness.
Every night she deserted their bed. Every night he would either wake to find her missing or come to bed after another round of irritating international conference calls to find she wasn’t there. Every night he would hunt her down, find her sleeping somewhere else in this sprawling place and sometimes muttering and thrashing in a way that suggested anything but sweet dreams, and carry her back with him.
Every single night, and they never discussed it.
Nicodemus assumed it was her last gasp of rebellion, and on some level he couldn’t help but admire her hardheadedness and persistence. But it wasn’t admiration he felt tonight as he failed to locate her in any of her usual spots. She wasn’t in any of the guest suites. She wasn’t in the great room, the solarium or on the leather couch in his office. He went through every room of the villa without finding her, and it was only when he stood near the wall of windows outside his private gym and indoor lap pool that he realized she’d escalated things and left the building.